Joining the Cambridge Astronomy Association

On Friday 15th February I took a trip to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, for my first ever meeting of the Cambridge Astronomy Association.  I had viewed their website before, but something caught my eye which was a talk by Ralph Bell from Green Witch in Cambridge about imaging with a web cam and

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Moon Images via Meade DSI Pro

After purchasing my Meade DSI Pro from eBay (see this post about it), I was itching to give it a go. As the moon was out, it seemed the perfect object to use in order to ‘cut my teeth’ on the DSI Pro, especially as I do not have any CCD filters to use yet

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Mars Observers Guide Book Review

This version of the Mars Observer’s Guide was published in 2003.  It is one of the pocket sized Philip’s books which retails at under £10. Mars Observer’s Guide contains a lot of full colour pictures and diagrams all of which are very high quality images. The book begins by looking at the main features of

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Mercury and Venus Transit Dates

Since purchasing a Solar filter and mask, together with a lot of information about Mercury being recently published, I wanted to know when the next transits of the Sun occur, so I can view them. Well it turns out the first one is not until 2012. As seen from Earth, only transits of the inner

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First Saturn via Web Cam

I was looking forward to this time of year and having Saturn back in view.  I started my astronomy hobby in May, and at that point I did get some views of Saturn through my Bresser 130N telescope, but was not really able to image it with a manual scope. The evening was not great

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Astronomy Blog on New Server

Apologies to anyone who visited in the last hour (between 2.30pm – 3.30pm) and got a blank white page.  I moved the astronomy blog from a shared hosting account to a new web server.  Hopefully everything should be fully working as usual, if not, then there may be the odd bug to iron out.

Find Asteroid TU24 in Stellarium

I know this may be a bit late, but as soon I knew about the Asteroid TU24 passing the earth, I went into Starry Night Pro to try and find the asteroid, but it was not in the program, so I went to Meade Autostar Suite and again I could not find the TU24 asteroid

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Sky at Night February Issue Not Received

It appears my February issue of The Sky at Night magazine is a bit late, as it has not arrived yet. So far a week overdue. I have only had 4 issues so far in my subscription and they usually appear on time. I have now emailed the magazine team and also left a message

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Purchase Made: Meade DSI Pro

I had been looking out for a Meade DSI for a while, although I did not want to pay the full retail price, that meant looking for a second hand model, either on eBay or AstroBuySell. I ended up buying my DSI Pro from eBay, and there was a bit of confusion between what model

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Life on Mars – Photo of Person?

These amazing images were among many sent back to Earth by Spirit, Nasa’s Mars explorer vehicle which landed there four years ago. The images have been featured in the UK newspapers this week and are very interesting, but surely they are just rocks which have formed on the red planet into a human type form

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